What I’ve learned about domestic violence by writing Sugar: A Hawaiian Novel

            This topic logically divides itself into several perspectives:  a. what I’ve learned through conversations with others; b. what I’ve realized about my own personal experiences, i.e., history, with domestic violence; c. what I learned through the writing process.

            When I’ve read this essay to others, they’ve suggested that I establish early on that my perspective on abuse, child abuse in particular, be underscored at the outset as something I’ve experienced first hand, not sexual or physical abuse, but psychological for sure.

            “Psychological abuse?  Is that really abuse at all?” I’ve been asked.  If you don’t think so, read on.

            Where to dive in beyond that?  Instinct tells me to start by listing some of the givens.

            First Given:  There are lots of things one can do to alleviate or mollify the effects of domestic violence, but there is no such thing as eradicating them.  They are in many respects indelible.  It’s like the fruit that’s been gnawed at, dropped, or otherwise bruised.  You can wax it, paint it, or perhaps even fluff or puff it up a little, but it’s always going to be bruised.  That’s why domestic violence is so important to prevent—innocent victims, permanent damage.

            “Buck up!”  I’ve heard people say.  “Develop a stiff upper lip.  Reach deeply for some courage.  Be strong and quit whining.”  This all sounds good, plausible, reasonable and proper.  The trouble is that it doesn’t work, because the experience of being abused results in subtle, perhaps undetectable, unknown or unnoticed changes to one’s internal wiring.  Oftentimes, the victim doesn’t even know it’s there.  If you don’t know it’s there, how can you do anything to correct it?

            Let me give you an example, Lili marrying the wrong guy in Sugar and then repeating her mistake by doing the same thing in ­Spice.  Illustrating this phenomenon was much of the central thesis of Spice.

          The point is that she didn’t know she was marrying the wrong guy!  She gravitated to the familiar.  She loved her father.  Lots of women marry their father’s personalities, interests, demeanors and such.  Why would you think this phenomenon was any less common among the abused?  And, the men she married in my novels were not openly abusive at the outset, quite the contrary.  They were gracious, charming, going out of their way trying to win her heart.  Any fool knows that’s not accomplished by beating.

            Then how did she pick abusers, if they weren’t openly abusive?   There are cues and clues, often subliminal that the subconscious mind picks up without realizing it.  To the extent that we understand the mating process at all, one is attracted on a subconscious, not openly conscious level.  Remember, the abuser-abusee relationship is seldom a hate-hate relationship from the victim’s point of view.  It’s a love-hate relationship.  The victim is picking up the love aspect without realizing that it’s part of a poisoned package.

           And what is it from the abuser’s point of view?  I have a hard time answering that because I’ve never defined myself as an abuser and don’t believe I have ever been, certainly not intentionally.  To the extent that I was abused by my mother, I do not at this point conclude that she did not love me, although her capacity to express this love was virtually non-existent or at best warped at the time.

            Then I went out and married women with her predominant personality characteristics until I eventually found a fulfilling, stable, mature and loving relationship.  Will Sugar in the next novel in the series, That’s What Little Girls are Made of, I wonder? 

          Relationship counselors, and others, have told me, “If you have an unsuccessful relationship akin to marriage and it goes sour, you will most likely either marry the same person again, or the exact opposite.”  Thank God I appear to have done the latter and have now been happily married for twenty-four years and counting.

            But that doesn’t mean that I don’t still suffer from the vagaries of abuse.  I have a difficult time in interpersonal relationships and some of this is attributable to the abuse.  I have difficulty trusting others not to betray me in the ordinary dance of life, where one may expect certain levels of affection, trust, confidence and such to be shared on a reciprocal basis. 

            I was let down so many times by my mother that at critical junctures, I’m conditioned to expect just that—being let down, whether it’s in a friendship, a marriage, a simple acquaintanceship or business relationship.  If my wife weren’t so perceptive, accepting and committed, I would never have made it through twenty-four years with her.

            By now you are probably wondering how I was abused by my mother.  She died a few years ago and until then I would not have shared this information, not so much to protect her, but out of respect for my sister and not wanting to put her into a position wherein she would have suffered the fallout from my disclosures, given her geographical proximity to my mother’s residence. 

         Before I get to my mother, though, I’ll start with my father.  He was always loving.  He was also mentally ill.  Except for serving as the ultimate enabler for my mother, he never would have abused me.   

(Isn’t that the way with abusers?  Do they require an enabler?  I mean so many of them have one.)

He supported my mother in everything she did, as though my feelings, or those of my sister, or our families and offspring were trumped without further reason or scrutiny.  In this sense he was a participant.  Otherwise, he was not, except for a few isolated instances.

My dad was bipolar, or manic-depressive, as we called it then, and while I could logically blame a lot on the way he acted (in a word “crazy”)—for example I was once held at gunpoint, along with my mother, I was by and large immune to his antics.  It was more like watching a circus act, say a clown or the bearded lady, from the cheap seats than being in the cage with the lion tamer.

The lioness was my mother.  What was her abuse?

Whatever it was, in my mind it begins with the proposition that she was among the most perfectly selfish women I’ve ever met.  Other blue ribbon contenders include my first and second wives.  I’m told that my mother’s father and/or sister might have contended for the honor, but I don’t know enough about any of them, first hand, to take those hypotheses past the state of conjecture.

            It went like this.  “I’m hungry, Mom.”

            “Quit your bellyaching!” 

            “Quit your bellyaching,” was a favorite phrase of hers.  I can’t say that I was malnourished, but I can say that I often went hungry, while she went about the business of filling her house with antiques over my needs and desires, or my dad’s or sister’s for that matter.  My sister didn’t get to go to college, because my parents didn’t feel that girls needed to go to college, even though she graduated second in her high school class. 

            To give him credit, my dad did put his foot down on that one on my behalf.  He insisted that I go, if I chose to do so.  I did, particularly since I couldn’t wait to get out of their house.  I never looked back.

            The selfishness in retrospect hurt the deepest, but there were other aspects to the abuse.  One was that she was either crazy or “crazed,” depending on how you look at it.  But I didn’t see her as exempt from accountability, because she seemed to have such a calculated dominance over our family’s agenda and priorities, especially my dad’s.

She popped nerve tablets her whole life. She was a prescription drug addict.  I don’t know what she took, just “nerve pills,” as she called them.  My mother could never stand to be too far away from her cache of “nerve pills.”

            “I believe I’ll have a nerve tablet,” I can still remember her saying in as satisfied of a voice as others might announce that they were about to have a cool glass of ice water.

            She was also paranoid.  She was afraid to ride in the car and didn’t drive.  She was afraid of heights.  She was afraid of bodies of water, even from a considerable distance.  She was terrified of crossing bridges and often blamed me for manipulating instances wherein she would be required to do so, saying that I obviously had chosen a particular destination on or near a body of water just to torment her.

            Unfortunately, I couldn’t write off this dementia as I had for my dad and merely watch her from a distance for she insisted on drawing me into her drama.  It was like, “step on a crack and break your mother’s back,” only with real, charged, venomous emotion behind it.  It took me three times to pass the test to get my driver’s license, because she legislated that only licensed drivers were fit to drive.  So I never got to practice beyond the minimal number of hours I spent behind the wheel (less than five) in driver’s training.   

           I take that back, once she asked my dad to pull over, so that I could drive the last 1/8^th of a mile to our house from the stop sign, less than a quarter of a block away.  Does this perhaps give you a better idea as to what is meant by psychological abuse?

            And I’m not done.  There was no affection openly expressed.  She never touched me, except when she washed my hair as a young child.  My sister has told me that if it weren’t for her, I would never have been touched, as a child.  My dad didn’t touch me either.  I’m not sure why.  Maybe it was one of her rules, or stated preferences, which he obeyed.  I do know that later in life my mother became critical of my wife by telling her that she was doing altogether too much touching of our children.  “Children are not meant to be touched that much,” she argued.

            I never heard “I love you,” from my mother’s lips until she was seventy-five years old and thought she was on her death bed.  Even then, I had to say it first and left her with a pregnant pause to fill.  I never heard those words again after that one time, during the remaining ten years of her life.

           But I did hear lots of complaining and lots of “poor me,” talk vis-à-vis every relationship she was ever in.  Oh, and I almost forgot.

            She would argue with me about reality, things that were very simple and straightforward propositions, like whether it was light or dark out.  It may sound easy to you to ignore someone who is telling you it’s light out when it’s dark or vice-versa, but when you’re a small child and it’s your mother insisting, arguing, cajoling, putting you down, bantering you with her point of view, it’s lucky if you turn out sane.  My father always agreed with her.  The effects were devastating.

          Given #2:  People you might least expect will come to the aid of and defend the abuser.  My dad facilitated my mother’s abuse and without him it could not have occurred.  In the case of sexual abuse, which was not a factor in my upbringing, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that the wife/mother protected her spouse against the claims and protestations of her children at worst and at the very least turned her head and denied the occurrences.  Why is this?  I can only speculate, but the results are tragic.

            I remember asking my brother-in-law (twelve years older than I am) to confirm my mother’s idiosyncratic behavior as being bizarre and/or destructive and/or crazy.  Instead, he said, “Danny, you need to be more considerate of your mother.  You need to be more patient with her, more understanding.”

           Didn’t he have this backwards?  His mere confirmation, as I was struggling to identify who was sane and who was not in our household, would have given me tremendous comfort and confidence at a time when I desperately needed it.

           I can remember being in a child custody dispute with my first wife and the court approved counselor, who was also our family counselor, refused to back me against some ludicrous demands of my first wife.  Here’s what she said.

            “Dan, there is no chance your X will be reasonable, so it’s incumbent on you to be the one who bends.  Otherwise, she will walk out of your kid’s lives.  She’ll do anything to assert her power.”

            My daughter has since expressed to me that that might have been the better outcome.  I don’t know about my son, but I do know that I married my mother in terms of her domineering personality twice, right down to distorted views of reality.

            When I first “came out,” about my mother’s abuse, her sister berated me and said privately to another, “Danny should just let this go.  It’s terrible what he’s done with respect to disclosing things about his mother.  It doesn’t matter whether they’re true or not.  It’s a terrible thing to talk about, especially publicly.”

            The person this was said to had the wisdom and insight, when I began to apologize to stop me and say, “Stop it!  Stop it right now!  The victim never apologizes or has to feel badly for exposing the abuser.  Period.  End of discussion.”  She’s in the mental health field.

            This response was the exception, though.  Once in a radio interview on Kaua’i, I was berated by the commentator for exposing a preponderance of deviant sexual behavior on that island.  She said, “How do you think it makes people feel, especially the ones who were involved?”

            I responded that if she was talking about the abusers, which I still believe she was, I told her that if they can’t stand me exposing their behavior to the light of day, then they should be the ones being apologetic, not me.

            She went on to further berate me with respect to the effect this book might have on the image of the islands and tourism in particular. 

            I responded by telling her that if my book, or my commentary, prevented one incidence of abuse, then it was worth all the tourism and all the image.  She hung up in a huff.  (It was a telephone interview.)

            I ask you, should the abused be the one to apologize? 

            Given #3:  Abuse, particularly sexual abuse, which is one of the themes in Sugar is far more pervasive than anyone is willing to admit.  I know this by virtue of the number of people who’ve stepped forward and told me they were abused.  They had no reason to lie.

          I am now prompted to quit listing the givens and share my advice with others who have been abused.  What is the best that can be done after the fact?

            i. The first thing you need to learn to do is to forgive the abuser.  This is not to be confused with either a. letting them off the hook where prosecution or financial retribution may be in order or b. not taking action to stop them from abusing others.

           What I mean by this is that you have to learn to forgive them in your heart.  To do otherwise will leave you with a poison chip within you that will eventually kill you, if not physically, then spiritually.  It will create a constant shroud that will keep you from realizing your full potential for happiness and well being as a human being.

          The second thing is to share your counsel, your empathy and your emotional, financial, physical and moral support to the prevention of abuse to others.  It is you and only you who can ever appreciate the full depth and scope of the injury.  If you are not dedicated to the eradication of this dreadful behavior, then who is or will be?  Others may join you, but you have to lead the charge.  It’s a part of the responsibility that comes with your heritage.

          A portion of the sale of every copy of Sugar: A Hawaiian Novel goes to organization(s) devoted to the prevention of child abuse, such as Prevent Child Abuse Hawaii.  Others have been offered both financial support from me as well as legal aid, but have declined out of deference to my critics, who think that maintaining the image of Kauai as a tourist destination is more important than preventing one more case of child abuse on that island.  You can’t believe how powerful, organized and downright nasty certain factions have been to me, as I pursue this cause.  That type of attitude has to change.

           And now for our one bit of consolation, as abusees.  For many of us who survived it intact, we’ve become super-strong as a result in many ways that others will never be able to approach.  We’ve paid a heavy price and in return we’ve become case hardened to the ways of the world.  This has enabled us to become warriors with levels of strength, focus, dedication and commitment that can only be imagined by those who have not suffered in the same way or to the same extent.

          This, then, is our small jewel of consolation.  I would trade it in a nanosecond for normalcy, but since I can’t have that, I gratefully and graciously accept the one gem I got instead.